Obama The 'Magic Negro'-Senator Lends Himself to America's Idealized, Less Than Real Black Man

LA Times ^ | March 19, 2007 | David Ehrenstein

[cake_crumb]

"So all it took to expose the true face of liberalism was for Hillary Rodham-rodent to feel threatened by the competition candidacy of a man, a black man!"

Yep. Now it's official: she's a sexist as well as a racist...she's a ...a manophobe. She's a racist, sexist manophobe, making her divisive and mean spirited!

[MHGinTN]

Hey, I read the book, but didn't know a movie version was available! And I really like Will so I'm gonna find that one and watch it. [Am I allowed to say I like Will Smith because he's a family man, since I'm white and older than him?]

[NickatNite2003]

You know...If i were a black American
tghis article would really piss me off.
I think i'd want to burn the LA Times
down to the grouhnd.

[John Jorsett]

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest. [snip] His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by media).

I infer from this that the writer thinks an "authentic" Black man would be saying things like, "I'm gonna bus' a cap in yo honky ass, then go after your wimmen." David Ehrenstein appears to have some odd ideas about how Black men should behave. Being Black, I wonder if that's how he acts himself.

[Vaquero]

from...TEXAS RADIO.....The Doors:



The Negroes in the forest brightly feathered
They are saying, "Forget the night.
Live with us in forests of azure.
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned - immaculate."

[lesser_satan]

Dave Chapelle needs to read this piece and do a skit about it.

[mimaw]

I agree Hillary must feel really threatened. This Obama guy actually has the guts to leave the plantation. How dare he question the coronation of Hillary. Is obama black enough is another tactic used by the media to help Hillary. I think the majority of liberal writers are racists.

[mimaw]

I agree Hillary must feel really threatened. This Obama guy actually has the guts to leave the plantation. How dare he question the coronation of Hillary. Is obama black enough is another tactic used by the media to help Hillary. I think the majority of liberal writers are racists.

[TexasRepublic]

White guilt? Hell, not me!

[Riverman94610]

Black on WHITE violence?Where do YOU live?Around here blacks attack each other way more frequently than they do whites.They will attack Mexicans and Asians way before they hit whites.
Not saying there are no white victims.Just saying that they are at the bottom of the criminal class list in the black community.

[marron]

Democrat sociologists continue to obsess about race, and condescend based on race, and otherwise struggle with their historical guilt, and then project it onto America at large.

And they continue to make the mistake of judging America by the distorted and again condescending view of race projected by Hollywood, and by their own party leadership, and again to project it onto America at large.

I'm not sure how to relieve them of their pain. They could become Republicans, I suppose, and start treating people as individuals, but barring that there isn't much anyone can do.

[jordan8]

First of all what's with this "white America". White America isn't promoting Obama the left is. The Magic Negro wasn't created by ordinary white Americans but by liberal Hollywood. What little substance this piece has applies only to them. More important is the real nature of the Magic Negro phenomenon: it isn't caused by white guilt over slavery it is a propaganda ploy to calm whites during their dispossession. It's reverse stereotyping and like all overly good portrayals of nonwhites its essential essence is white-hating racism.

[Doogle]

His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by media).

..yeah until you mentioned his "ears" like MoDo did, then he turns into the typical liberal "I'll get you my pretty" rant.

[Beckwith]

To Obama, his mother is a Kumbaya-era liberal.  He feels that she messed up her life due to naïve faith in Third World countries and Third World men.

Years later, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his visiting mother’s insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959 Brazilian art-house classic "Black Orpheus."  He belatedly realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men.  He pompously intones, "The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.  Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart."

Wallace-Wells mentions in Rolling Stone:

There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama’s autobiography when he writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men.  "More than once," he recalls, "my mother would point out Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet."  What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama’s political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on the complicated dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man.

[toddlintown]

Intellectualizing the obvious; she dug the dark meat.

[rabidralph]

[Beckwith]

Ouch!

[happygrl]

TBMADF

[Rakkasan1]

maybe he could sing a remake called "Puff the Magic Negro".

[x]

The Simpsons did an episode on this very subject. The family is assigned to a social worker named Gabriel (voice by Delroy Lindo) and Homer keeps asking him if he's an angel.

There's an article about the archetype here